How Was Your Weekend? (Please Don't Ask)
週末どうだった?(聞かないで)
The most dangerous question in any office is "How was your weekend?"
It sounds completely , doesn't it?
But nobody actually wants the real answer, and everybody quietly knows it.
The correct response is not the truth; it is simply "Good, thanks. You?"
Marcus had, in fact, spent his weekend doing sort of nothing, which took skill.
"Get up to anything, then?" a colleague asked on Monday.
"Oh, you know, kind of relaxed, caught up on a few things," Marcus said, describing precisely no events whatsoever.
This was the sacred language of small talk: words that fill the air without carrying any actual meaning.
"Sounds lovely," said the colleague, who had not listened to a single word.
It's a strange little , isn't it, this exchange of noises we mistake for conversation?
Priya, still new, made the classic beginner's error of answering honestly.
"Actually, it was kind of a hard weekend," she began, and Marcus watched the man's face perform a small, silent panic.
"Oh. Well. These things happen, don't they?" he said, retreating rapidly toward the safety of the coffee machine.
"You're not supposed to be real," Marcus explained to her afterwards. "That's rather the whole point."
"So I should just lie?" she asked.
"Not lie, exactly. Just be sort of pleasantly ."
Vagueness, he told her, was the that kept the entire social machine turning smoothly.
"'How's the project going?' really means 'Please say fine.'"
"And 'We should catch up sometime' means 'We absolutely should not, but isn't it nice to say?'"
Priya practised, a little stiffly at first. "It was, um, kind of a quiet one. You?"
"Perfect," Marcus said warmly. "You told me nothing at all. I feel closer to you already."
By Wednesday she had mastered it completely, deflecting every question with a smile and a .
"You've become one of us," Marcus said, pretending to wipe away a proud tear.
"Is that a good thing?" she asked.
"Not really," he admitted. "But it's so much easier, isn't it?"